I recently wrote a post about software simulation in Articulate Storyline 2 – Six-cess: Six secrets to successful software simulation in Storyline 2 – and one of the tips I offered was to avoid using click & drag as a motion when recording your simulations. This is because Storyline 2 will only play these click & drag actions in “View” mode not so great if you are in the middle of a “Try” or “Test” mode sequence. When it comes to resizing objects, I don’t mind because I usually want them to be a specific size so going into the format menu isn’t a hardship. What does bug me, however, is when it comes to navigating scroll bars; clicking on the arrows rather than dragging the bar just seems wrong now – way too old school!

I needed to come up with a solution to this. There had to be a way. For a long time, it eluded me and then suddenly there it was staring me in the face: sliders! There’s some great examples of how you can use sliders on eLearning Heroes (check out Challenge #52) but scanning through them I couldn’t find one that used them in conjunction with a software simulation.

So how’s it done? Simply turn your slider on its side and you can drag it up and down to your hearts content. Associate the resulting variable to the trigger to jump you to the next slide and suddenly the sequence feels much more real. Let’s take a closer look at how it’s done:

How to…

Firstly, record your software simulation as normal clicking the scrollbar end arrows to activate them, this part of it hasn’t changed, you still need to go old school in the recording stage. It’s when you import the Try or Test mode that you make the changes.

Once the Try, or Test, mode has been inserted add a scrollbar to any slide where you need to scroll, I find the slim line version works best for this:

Rotate the slider 90° clockwise and place over the scroll bar in the on slide screencast and adjust the thumb and track formatting so they blend in nicely with your recording:

Adjust the Slider Properties by renaming it’s associated variable and setting appropriate start/end values to give you a suitable length of drag action:

Edit the “Play Media” trigger so the screencast clip plays when you move the Slider:

And finally, delete the Hotspot automatically placed on the slide by the import process.

And if you want to scroll on…

If you need to continue the scrolling on the next and subsequent slides simply copy the first slider and paste it onto the next slide and repeat the steps with these extra little tweaks:

Increase the initial value on the Slider Properties bar so the Thumb starts where you left off:

Add a Greater than condition to the trigger so the sequence only moves on if you drag the slider downwards:

And if you want to be able to go back up, add a trigger that says this:

So, there you go – using Sliders to recreate scrollbars in software simulations. I hope this helps with your projects, and I welcome any comments and feedback to hear how you are getting on!